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Trainer Dale Romans, who runs Dullahan in tomorrow’s Belmont Stakes, never has been shy about speaking his mind. At a press conference yesterday at Belmont Park, the native Kentuckian drew applause when he slammed the New York State Racing and Wagering Board for its much-criticized, knee-jerk decision to force all the Belmont runners into the same detention barn a few days before the race.

“The barn is ridiculous,” Romans said, putting into words what all the other horsemen are thinking. “There’s too many horses in there doing the same things at the same times. There’s too many people in there. There’s three or four people for every horse, and then everybody trying to walk in the afternoons and graze.

“I don’t think anybody who set that barn up or made the rules was thinking about the [horses]. It’s just not right to take them out of their environment and move them somewhere else three days out from the biggest day of their life.”

Romans kept rolling: “NYRA did the best job they could possibly do to make a bad situation good. They fixed the barn up as nice as it could be. It’s not NYRA, it’s the racing board. There’s a huge disconnect between the regulators and the reality of the backside.

“What this situation does is, it brings a bad perception to the game. It makes people think even worse, when really, this is a very clean sport [with] enough regular checks and balances in place to make sure it’s an even playing field.”

It’s no secret the SRWB instituted the detention barn because of the negative publicity surrounding Doug O’Neill, the trainer of Triple Crown hopeful I’ll Have Another, who said, half in jest, “If I get beat, I’m going to blame the security barn.”

“And that’s the problem,” Romans said. “The rest of the world will, too. If Doug’s horse were to lose, it will be human nature for people to say, ‘Well, they got him in the detention barn.’ That’s not fair. It diminishes his performance in the first two races of the Triple Crown, and it will also diminish the winner’s performance in the Belmont.”